Introduction
Eva: Welcome back to Community Resilience, a podcast created in collaboration with the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project, facilitated by the Global Ecovillage Network. I’m your host, Eva Goldfarb, inviting you to gather around the fire as we explore resilience, adaptation, and transformation in our time of deepening polycrisis.
Welcome. Today we are travelling to Piracanga Ecovillage, located on the eastern coast of Brazil in the state of Bahia, nestled between the forest and the beach. Piracanga has undergone great transformation in the past few years on a social, structural, and spiritual level. It is an honor to have them with us in the Resilience Project, and we hope you enjoy hearing from them as much as we do.
Today’s podcast guest is named Bruno Tambellini. He’s a permaculturist, EDE instructor, social entrepreneur, founder of the INKIRI Institute of Piracanga, and so much more. For four years, he has dedicated himself to the development of the Viva INKIRI University, a project that has trained more than 400 young people between 18 and 28 in social-emotional skills, while creating local impact through regenerative cultural training.
Interview with Bruno
Eva: Welcome, Bruno. For all of you listening, we are sitting with Bruno in Piracanga Ecovillage in Brazil, as well as with Thais, who is also working on this podcast production. Welcome.
Bruno: Thank you.
Eva: I wanted to start by giving everyone the opportunity to get to know you a little bit better. How did you become involved with the Ecovillage movement, and how did you become involved with Piricanga?
Bruno: I will try to be brief with that because it’s a long story, but I got connected with the Ecovillage movement because I was already working with sustainability, especially with permaculture design. And I was in a time in my life where I was part of many qualities and many projects with really, really interesting people that could change the world somehow. And I started to find out the main issues we were facing to not change the world were social aspects on relationship, which permaculture movement doesn’t go too deep on that. So I started to research that and I ended up knowing international communities and ecovillages. And through that time in 2010, I was living in Europe and somehow popped up to me the first ecovillage design education that were happening in Damanhur. So I knew I needed to go there straight away and from there my life changed. I met Kosha, Macaco and plenty of really interesting people. Damanhur was a big inspiration for me at that time. I learned a lot of things that were really important to my journey since today, like NVC and a lot of social techniques that were really, really still are really important. And then from Damanhur, I ended up being in Piracanga and arrived here in 2011, also with this wish of being part of an intentional community and a collective. So I ended up being here since the beginning of the formation of the INKIRI community and that was like a university for me.
Eva: Thank you so much. For those of you that aren’t familiar with NVC, Bruno is referring to non-violent communication. If you haven’t heard of that before, I highly recommend you look it up.
Next Bruno, I’m hoping you can help orient us a bit. Where are you in the world? Where is Piracanga? And furthermore, what makes it special?
Bruno: What makes this place special is surely people that are here. So people that are willing to make a change in the world. But also we are quite in a paradise. We are just on the beach side. We have a river here on the front of the land and then passing the river we have the beach. And we are surrounded by nature. So we have a river, a beach, we have a mangrove on our right side and we have like 80 hectares of Atlantic forest on the back. So that makes the place really, really, really special. Nowadays it’s somehow unique in the world that I know. So it’s really, really beautiful place to be. If you want to check it out, the people that are hearing us, there’s plenty of videos on the internet, like views from the sky. It’s really, really beautiful.
Eva: Next up Bruno, introducing or segwaying into the topic of resilience, which is why we are here. I’m hoping you can tell us a bit what resilience means for Piracanga.
Bruno: Yeah, it’s really, really interesting. We start our conversation with this first question because somehow through these years it’s something that is present in a conversation zone, also in an ecological movement. But everybody that are trying to make a change or to make something different of the normality, we are talking a lot about resilience for a long time now. And some time ago I started to question that, no? I started to question this situation on resilience because I started to think about and somehow human resilience brought where we are, somehow. With this aspect of resilience, we create a lot of things that we actually live in our society in general. And some of these things created by resilience, they are not like something that is necessarily ecological or sustainable, somehow. All the creation of agriculture is also part of a resilience process that humankind passed through. So I’m really questioning that, how we will keep talking about resilience without bringing the systemic way of thinking together.Because resilience without this systemic way of thinking doesn’t create sustainability necessarily. Because most of the times we are talking about resilience, yes, but we are talking on a linear way of thinking of this resilience and that doesn’t create sustainability. So bringing back to your question, I think Piracanga has an ecovillage, it’s trying to bring resilience on a systemic way of view to create sustainability and not just to be resilient and trying to solve and be adaptable for issues or situations that are coming up and not looking at it in a sustainable way or systemic way. I think this is a really, really important point that we need to bring it in all discussions that we are being part of. Not just about resilience but changing linear way of thinking and bringing systemic views through all the process we are doing. Absolutely. As we talk about the systemic challenges and how maybe they stand in the way of resilience or how ecovillages work to overcome them, I’m wondering if you have seen any tools or value any tools that have emerged from ecovillages, maybe from the resilience project or from your experience at Piracanga that addresses this and that builds resilience. As I start to talk in the beginning of our conversation, for me all these tools of learning to live together, they are like really, really, really important tools that we still are learning off and we need to get deep on that because actually my way, my worldview, it’s that all ended up in people, all ended up in the ways as we relate ourselves between each other. All connects with this capacity of getting a collective to work together to create solutions in also a social sustainable way. So all these tools and all these experiments that ecovillages are doing, all this capacity of working together that the ecovillages are bringing on, I think that are like really, really important tools on this vanguard of creating sustainability for the future and also creating resilience. All these tools and technologies that ecovillages and indigenous communities are bringing on, on the capacity of living together and creating solutions for issues together as a whole, I think this is one of the most important things on creating resilience. But also something really important to talk about, it’s what are we talking about when we bring resilience? Because if we look to the ecological natural way of view, resilience is there. If we look to the systems, the resilience are here. Plants are growing, creating life, finding solutions, resilience is there. The thing on when we talk about resilience, it’s actually social way of looking to the resilience. So as I said before, for me, in my worldview, the social aspect of humankind, it’s the central situation that we must look if we need to go forward as a species somehow. So everything on the ecovillages are somehow bringing this vanguard aspects of living together, of working together.
Eva: Absolutely. Thank you so much. For those of you listening, Bruno brought one of his plant friends to the screen to help make his point. Thank you for that, Bruno.
I’m wondering if Piracanga has a tool for creating this social resilience that you talk about. It can just be one.
Bruno: Yeah, I think for some time, the dream that we had together was one of the strongest tools that we had to create this resilience on the social aspect, because that was something when we were in doubt, because it’s natural that we get in doubt when we are with a lot of people.I used to say when people arrive here that, imagine everybody had an intimate relationship. And even if you have an intimate relationship that were a person that you choose to be together, you have issues and fights. And everybody that is listening knows what I’m talking about. Imagine if you put yourself with 30, 50, 100, 600 people that you didn’t choose to be together. Conflicts happen. But I had this feeling that when we had the dream together, that bounds us somehow, that helps us to get through all the difficult issues and processes that challenges us to be together and to live together and to work together. So I think having a dream, it could sound small to talk about a dream, but this is a huge thing. For you that are listening, try to get in touch. What is your dream? Do you have a dream or do you get lost in track? Getting the dream and leave the dream, let the dream alive, is something really, really huge when we talk about human connection.
Eva: Absolutely. I hope we can get a bit into that common dream. Next, I would ask a bit to reflect on the history of Piracanga through the Resilience Project. The communities involved fill out a historical timeline. And I’m curious if you learned anything through this process about patterns in your community and how you’ve responded to change over the years.
Bruno: Yeah, I think first of all, what I start to think about when we start the Resilience Project is that even working with ecology for so long, there was so much things that I was not looking at. Because especially when we talk about climate change, there is like an aspect that for me, somehow, drainage, this is a word in English, drainage, some of the hope. Because somehow we start to get to a point of like taking the hair off. Somehow, what we’re going to do, what we’re going to do. And when we started the Resilience Project, I understood that even for myself, there was so many things that I was not willing to look for. And we as a community were not looking for so many things that we need to look for. So one of the things that I learned, that I’m trying to bring not just for me, but also for the community, is this capacity of holding hope, even in this challenging circumstances that climate change brings to us.
Eva: Specifically, so we’re talking about change and adaptation and coping and a lot of the things that help build resilience. And I’m wondering if you have specific examples of the people of Piracanga and how they have addressed change, and how you’ve seen resilience on a personal level?
Bruno: Really deep question. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know how to reply for that out of this question on how they address this resilience. I think, as I say, it’s holding the hope somehow. Because we have something really, really, I don’t know if it happens in other places, in other eco-villages, but here in Piracanga, we used to call Piracanga, Piracambia. cambia in Spanish is like changing somehow. So it’s a place that is constantly changing, and it’s constantly pushing you towards resilience somehow in all the levels, on social, on emotional, on spiritual. So it’s a place that once you step in, it’s like you’re being pushed towards resilience. And not all the times this is really easy, because change is also something that is, for me, it’s also connected with chaos. So being in a chaotic space, it’s not all the time easy. And also change moves a lot of things also inside. Like I say, most of the people that I know that managed to keep going and keep focusing on resilience, on all these aspects of the place, they managed somehow to really connect it with hope.
Eva: Thank you. Do you have any community practices that are established to help work through that chaos? For example, dancing or spiritual or self-development practices?
Bruno: Through the time of the INKIRI community, we were really connected with the technique that was really, really important for us here, that we call Aura Reading, that is a spiritual practice that is connected with people between spirits, Auras, somehow. And through difficult times we used to get together and also use this technique of Aura Reading to read unseen fields somehow, like the field that is not seen, to bring different aspects that are not just connected with what we see, but also connected with the feeling that we have to address these moments of changes and these kinds of aspects.
Eva: Thank you very much. You’ve now mentioned the INKIRI community at least one time, and I’m wondering if, for the listeners, you can explain a bit the relationship between INKIRI and Piracanga and what that transition has looked like.
Bruno: Well, really, really difficult to reply to this question without bringing a personal view, but through the history of Piracanga, many things have happened in this place. It’s a really unique story, also when we talk about formations on ecovillages and intentional communities, but the INKIRI community was like a part of the timeline of this the story of this place that lasts for 11 years, and was the formation of an intentional community in 2011 that lasted until 2022, I believe, something like that. And these were like a really important time for this place, because we’re actually at a time where a group of people that were living here get together and start to make these dreams come true, and start to bring on all the gifts they had and all their lives to build solutions for human occupation, somehow, to human development. So, at that moment, we have 25 projects working together with different areas of human intervention. There’s a bank, a university. Well, a lot of things had happened through the INKIRI community in this way of creating solutions for different aspects of human living. Have you noticed how this shifting of human structures or systems of human living have made the people of Piracanga and INKIRI more resilient or more able to cope with change or hardship? Yeah, for sure. Once we had the INKIRI community, the capacity, a social capacity of making resilience were much stronger, because while we were a group of people that managed to bond somehow more on creating solutions and resilience between each other. So, it shifts a lot. And I have the feeling that now we are somehow facing some challenges also on creating social resilience and bringing back, because it’s also part of cycle somehow. We are, after the pandemic situation, re-getting to a cycle of that to start a new cycle of life. I’m talking about a social aspect, again. We need much more resilience to get through that. And in our case, this cycle of ending on an intentional community to start something new is still like in a place where some of the structures are starting to appear. Structures that help to hold this resilience. They start to raise. It’s like a forest again. No, it’s like a big tree had fallen. So, we are still getting to these new sprouts that getting up once this big tree fell and sunlight are getting in again and bringing these new sprouts that will hold the structures of resilience.
Eva: Beautiful. You are weaving together this interview so fluidly. Thank you for touching on the social dimension and even bringing in the metaphors of the ecological. And I’m wondering, aside from the social changes and shocks that you’ve seen at Pirikanga, have there also been ecological shocks? You talked earlier about lots of things that you weren’t looking at, but has there been anything very apparent in Brazil and Latin America in general?
Bruno: For sure. It’s like as working in the resilience project, for me, it gets really clear that most of us that are between tropics are starting to face the most ecological impacts now. People that are in Spain, Portugal, are getting to this dryness. We are getting the opposite. We are getting a lot of floods and rain. This year, actually, 2023, it gets a little bit more normal because of this situation of the El Nino and La Nina. So, it gets a little bit drier again. And the scientists are saying that for the next four years, we are going to get drier than we used to be. But for the past two years and a half, we get really strong rains and a lot of floods, a lot of storm, lighting storms that we used not to have. So, this is really a huge impact in the region. Like 2020, there was a huge flow on the Bahia region that is where we are. A lot of people get without houses and it was like a big disaster. And it also happens in 2021, not so strongly, but also happened in 2021. So, this huge flood that happens in 2020 also impacts a little bit us in some aspects, but not so much as some people in the region and also in Brazil. In our case, we get isolated for some days because we had our river that passed through our road that got flooded and we didn’t manage to get out for some days. And also, the water table gets too high in the point of getting out of soil. So, this is actually a huge issue when we talk about climate change. Because once our water table gets high on the soil, that impacts a lot on our life here, especially on our water treatment systems and forests itself. Because once the water table gets too high and if it gets too high for too long, like the roots of the trees start to get rotted and then they start to fall. And this is a huge impact that we’re going to face if we keep like that. Maybe we’re going to lose all the forest if the water table gets too high and until the time the forest manages to regain its resilience and start to maybe grow some mangroves or something like that, it’s going to be a huge disaster.
Eva: How are you holding hope through this awareness?
Bruno: At that time, the hope is being aware of what is going to happen and trying to find solutions to make this shift. Because this is one of the things, you know, I see also the easy way to get resilience is also to make it smoothly, make the change smoothly somehow. It’s easier to have resilience when you manage to make it smoothly and not changing direction too fast. And that also happens in nature. As I say, sometimes if you have a river and the river is flowing smoothly, the chaos and the changing on that is really nice. But if suddenly you have like a 90 degrees curve, you’re going to see like a chaos and like huge currents on the river. So that makes all the things a little bit more difficult to hold resilience. And it’s what we are facing on climate change somehow. We are talking about climate change for 30 years already, you know. And just now when the things start to get more rough, we get, oh my god, climate change, climate change. We were talking about that 30 years ago. We could make a transition smoothly. But I think we as humans, we like emotion somehow. I cannot find another way of looking to it. So we are holding hope on getting the knowledge of what is going to happen and try to make a transition smoothly and not so intense. This is the way we are trying to hold hope.
Eva: Thank you very much. Looking a bit into the other areas of regeneration, do you see economics playing a role in the overall resiliency of the community?
Bruno: Yeah, surely. Surely it also plays a huge role on resilience. And it’s something that is also important to look to it. And bringing back the pandemic structure and pandemic situation, that also makes a huge change on the economical structure, on the place, especially on the surrounding. And I’m pretty sure that that happens in a lot of places in the world, like places that were beautiful or places where people used to have a really good life. Like all prices, especially on land owning and all this situation starts to get higher because naturally most of the people that were facing the lockdown pandemic situation and were stuck in an apartment, some of them start to think about the life they were having. And some of them start to, when pandemic starts to go a little bit down, start to wanting to move to the countryside. That was like a phenomenon that happened everywhere in the world. And also happened with us here, because as I say, we are just on the beach side. We used to have six kilometers of empty beach to south and 16 kilometers of empty beach for north. And after the pandemic situation, price of land starts to raise, more companies wanting to buy land on the beach side here, where we are to make like huge resorts and all that. So this is a huge impact on economics, on the surrounding, especially on the process of gentrification on the place. So this is something that we still are trying to look for when we talk about economical resilience, because there’s two ways of looking at it. Because if we talk about economic resilience without looking at the social class or people that used to live here before, like again, know what I say in the beginning, we could look to resilience without looking to this systemic way of view. And this is really, really important in this case when we talk about economics, because we are in Brazil, people that used to live in these lands were indigenous people, they own these lands. After that, there was a lot of people that were bringing from Africa and in slavery that also be part of this place. Bahia is the state where Portuguese people arrive when they arrive in Brazil. So everything starts here. So we need to look on the resilience economy, also looking to these communities that are on the surrounding, that some of them were fishermen or people that were coming from this quilombolas community that exists here before you know it’s like we need to look to economic situation not just on on the village no i’m not just talking about Piracanga ecovillage but i’m talking about the region no because we need to look to it so we are trying to bring these questions up but this this aspect is not so easy to find solutions for now as for instance for me we need a huge like work to regive the power for these communities on the surrounding now and sometimes power is also related with economy in our society is really a lot related with economic and money
Eva: and culture you very much also just woven in the next topics around bringing traditional knowledge and indigenous wisdom to be celebrated in community and also this interrelation with the nearby regions and i’m just curious how is piracanga’s relationship with the local communities and have you begun bringing these conversations outside
Bruno: wow also like a big big big question and it’s a situation that depends more on the organization and people that are here in Piracanga that Piracanga as a whole so in my way of view we have a lot to walk yet to get really connected with these local communities and this local environment when we used to have this in the inqiri community working we all the INKIRI community were settled in a institute that were settled in a third sector that had one of the projects that were looking to the surrounding communities so that is also a part of the resilience that make everything much more easy you know because you had like a group of people that work together and then this group of people that were working together pick up like a part of this and create a project to also look for this aspect nowadays it’s like something that i have the feeling that is a wish for most of the people that are here now but not everybody knows how to do with that like huge topic that we still have a lot to walk on but i have this feeling that we are going to this this direction because we have like a really beautiful culture on the surrounding really beautiful people here really like beautiful knowledge here on the surrounding and more and more these people are arriving and more and more we are getting together i think getting also in touch on some politics the previous government that we had in brazil also give this for us they give the need of people get together on what they believe somehow so more and more get like on like the need to to get in touch with the indigenous community and all with this minority community this is a terrible word to use but i don’t know how to spell that in english but we need to get together with these people we need to get together and create this situation as a as a whole but still we are like walking through it
Eva: Has being in the resilience community of practice helped this conversation in any way and if not specifically with this case if you could give one example of how it has
Bruno: I think it as i say the climate changes for everybody it’s like we are in a one planet so climate change is for everybody and get in touch with the resilience project brought a lot of the direction on looking through this climate change and how that will impact us so this also somehow gets us together with these communities on the surrounding because we are we are also looking and thinking about them so this is something that resilience project brought us together with the local community also to to bring this information for them and to work together with them to to try to make this transition more smoothly also for them and not just for us because climate change will be for everybody
Eva: absolutely. Bruno, I am so sad that i have to wrap up this conversation the time has gone really quickly and i’ve really appreciated it i’m wondering if you can leave us with any resources or tools from your personal practices that help in building resilience connecting with the land or whatever you feel called to share
Bruno: well first of all something that i already say it’s like get together with the dream that we have inside this is something that move us and most of us or some of us we sometimes we lose this dream we lose the worldview that we want not just for us but also for our children so connect with that is something that is really really really really important and not just connected with that but also start to do something to create that what we believe because this is another thing sometimes we get we know how is our dream but it’s like we are not doing anything to to get close to it life is just one in this body somehow i believe no so time is the biggest gift we have we choose what we’re gonna do with that so either you can choose to put your time to build a system that creates a world that will lead us to extinction or either you can put your time to create a world that you really believe that you want to bring to to you and to your children i think this is the most important thing and and once you start to do that you’re gonna find people that are also wanting to do that and once you find people that are also wanting to do that you will find resilience inside
Eva: Bruno thank you so much for your passion and for your inspiration it’s been really lovely talking with you
Bruno: thank you Eva thank you very much for the project that you are holding thank you very much for GEN that are bringing solutions and like putting effort putting people together to make a like a beautiful work since all this year so thank you very much also to give me this opportunity to be here
Eva: The treat is mine.
And thank you all for listening. I left this conversation feeling inspired by the work of Piracanga, the INKIRI project and by Bruno himself. One thing that really stood out to me during our conversation was this notion of holding hope so before we leave each other today i wanted to ask how are you holding hope? How could you be holding hope?
Remember you can join us again next week as we continue the conversation over what it means to be resilient in our time of poly crisis while you wait for the next episode of community resilience we invite you to explore more about the ecovillage resilience 2.5 degree project by visiting us online at ecovillage.org/resilience
GEN Staff
Leave a Reply